All businesses desire to increase the loyalty of their customers because it is well-recognized that increasing loyalty leads to increased profits. Most businesses, however, find increased customer loyalty to be an elusive goal. It is difficult to increase loyalty in a business or other relationship not only because it can be challenging to identify the concrete actions that need to be taken to increase such loyalty, but also because it can be difficult even to measure the current loyalty of a customer or other party to the relationship. Failure to obtain a concrete and objective measurement of current loyalty will almost certainly lead to an inability to identify those concrete actions which are likely to increase such loyalty most efficiently.
Prior art techniques for measuring loyalty often require information about existing business relationships to be provided in the form of structured quantitative data, such as numerical answers to predetermined survey questions. Such techniques have limited usefulness, however, because it can be difficult and time-consuming to obtain such structured quantitative data from partners to a relationship. What is needed, therefore, are techniques for measuring loyalty based on unstructured and/or non-quantitative data, such as letters, email messages, blog entries, and other documents written by partners to a relationship.